After shutting down Google Hangouts for Workspace users in February, the popular tech giant, Google is now starting to migrate people who had access to free, personal Hangouts to Chat. Google recently announced on its blog that those who are still continuing to use the Hangouts mobile app will now start seeing a prompt asking them to move to Chat.
The tech giant also announced that it won’t start prompting users to switch to Chat until the month of July. According to sources, Hangouts will remain accessible on the desktop site until November. Google has said that it will warn users at least one month in advance before it will start shifting the Hangouts site to Chat.
Surprisingly, Hangouts was supposed to be the successor of GChat (or Google Talk) and now it will be replaced by Google Chat. The first time Google hinted about its plans to make this transition from Hangouts to Chat was in 2018. The company also made the feature free for all its users in the year 2020.
Google will automatically transfer your existing conversations to Chat if you are still using Hangouts. The tech giant also gives you an option of downloading a copy of your Google Hangouts data using its Takeout service before it’s officially stopped in November.
To attract users into making a switch to Chat, Google will roll out numerous new features such as create in-line threads in Spaces, ability to make direct calls, and share and view multiple images.
So, now when traveling via international flights for work trips, you can make a switch to Google Chat to stay connected with your colleagues or clients.
